“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because there is no place to start. It doesn’t make a story.” A single strangely shaped shadow revealed the declivity of her cheek and any motion at all made her eyes go from reflecting to bottomless. No wonder she had Stanton under such crazy control as Quinn was now sure she had, dancing like a circus horse, a little out of hand perhaps, but out there on the lead under unreckonable command. Quinn liked this thought: Stanton a little dappled stallion waltzing on a barrel head, jumping through pastel flames; behind, the gallery in regular ascending semicircles of vacuous faces; Stanton’s hoofs muffled in the sawdust as he trots steadily round Janey in silk top hat and tails, her whip curling toward his dappled buttocks like a silk thread. Then, after the last hoop, Stanton fetches up under the big top; there is mechanical applause like seawaves. A tiny car drives up and skids to a stop. Enthusiastic applause as a family of midgets bails out with luggage. The pony begins to go sour. He whinnies aggressively. The midgets stop in trepidation. The booing begins like the groaning of a tree about to fall and rises as the pony rushes among the midgets, striking out with varnished crescent hoofs, the booing rising as the midgets begin to take a beating; then the inscrutable crowd comes out of the bleachers and smothers the pony in sharp downward blows like the branches of a collapsing tree. As it came to Quinn’s mind, he wondered if it was accurate.
Janey said: “One night, in Puerto Rico, Vernor heard a woman crying on the balcony outside his hotel. He went out and saw her leaning against the wall covering her face up with her hands. She was still crying. Vernor asked what happened and she said she had been attacked by a man. Vernor asked her what he looked like and she took her hands down from her face. Vernor asked her what he looked like again and she stared at him just a minute and said, ‘You.’” The woman, Janey said, was her Aunt Judy. Vernor was horrified and fascinated, he fell in love. But she only went out with him and let him stay with her betweentimes: there were others. “I had to console the poor lovesick baby and, oh, me, he was starry-eyed! He offered her the world and everything he had. Now, then, one day he came over in the morning. I think it was on a hunch. Judy was sleeping in the bedroom with a dealer from the El Convento. And Vernor smoked and fussed and tried to talk to me. I can tell you it was tense, boy. I talked my head off. Vernor was puffing his cigarette and squinting at the bedroom door until Judy came out in a peignoir still beautiful but very rundown looking and in a bad mood. Vernor tried too hard to be pleasant and told her she looked mussed up or something, though maybe it was only the unfortunate lighting. Judy said, ‘I just woke up. Get it? I just woke up.’ He began yelling that someone was there. The dealer walked out of the bedroom, fully dressed and said, ‘A for excellent.’ He had a pistol in his hand and he wasn’t waving it around or anything. He just had it. He walked right past Vernor and went over to the mirror and tucked the pistol under his chin and smoothed his hair down with both hands. Then he put the pistol in the top of his pants and squeezed the knot of his tie between his thumbs and put the pistol in his pocket. He asked Vernor how he looked and Vernor said he looked as sharp as a tack. And then the dealer asked how he liked the tie and I thought somebody would get killed but Vernor said that the tie was of the very finest.” Later, Stanton befriended the dealer and took him deep-sea fishing and by some slip or concatenation of circumstances left the dealer in a yellow rubber raft a hundred miles off the Mayaguana Bank. When the police informed Stanton that though the dealer would not let them bring him to justice, they thought he ought to know the man was in the hospital with third degree burns from the sun. “Next time,” Stanton said, “he won’t leave his Coppertone on his beach blanket.” Judy used the police without reserve; she kept a small, gray one at her door with instructions to shoot or arrest Stanton on sight. “He got so desperate he settled for me,” said Janey. “And I couldn’t pass him up.”
Quinn helped her with her coat. It was a dressy, tailored coat with a velvet collar and looked good with the old cotton slacks she wore. Quinn could see that she was feeling what had settled over the club; the apprehension widened her eyes and emphasized the almost foxlike shape of her face. Then his mind wandered from Janey in dejection and replaced her with Mary Beth complete with bagpipes. Doggedly, Quinn watched himself unwind her kilt; but instead of the herring-white Scots flesh he has resigned himself to, he discovers a set of prickly duck-hunters’ underwear. What’s the meaning of this?
“The meaning of what?”
“Talking to myself.”
* * *
What a smell! Anyone would think that people who had as many pretenses as these club members had would have the decency to go a little way from the tent. And the body odor, especially the women, was not the reassuring funk of laborers; this was the smell of people who had been deep in deodorants until a couple of days ago; it was something smarmy, acidic and sour. Quinn made his way along the tent. He recoiled from one odor to another until, in resignation, he accepted and his nose pumped steadily at the single generalized odor that was a meld of everything from axilla to organic debris and smelled like clam soil.
People went to and fro as though in a blackout, with a rather useless air of carrying on. A portable generator ran somewhere and lightbulbs hung in the trees, swung and heaved in the breeze and threw monstrous shadows everywhere. The children were playing in the black rectangle of shadow at the end of the tent and their fierce voices came brokenly. “… no, you can’t!… Eat it raw!” Then the piping voice of a little girl, “Okay for you, Billy! Now I have to kick you in the noogies!” Quinn was shoved rudely from behind. It was Fortescue carrying the front end of a small platform. “If you can’t help, get out of the way.” Stanton came past carrying the other end. They placed it opposite the center of the collapsed tent, that is, between the tent and the Bug House. Quinn glared after Fortescue. When Fortescue had put his end down he looked back and caught Quinn’s eye. “Go home, Quinn! Please go!”
“Let’s hurry it up,” Stanton said to him. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Is this speech going to be long?” Fortescue asked.
“Brief, very brief, very brief.”
“What about a little fireworks first?”
“Okay, give ’em fireworks.”
“The singing though.”
“Give ’em the fucking singing.”
“What about a couple of rockets, see, and then you have the singing coming right in there afterward.”
“Get this: I don’t care. But whatever it is, make it snappy.”
“Sure, okay. We have all the time in the world. Spengler burned his chronicle, you know. So, we’ll have more time for you.”
Quinn approached. “What’d he burn his chronicle for?”
“Come on,” Fortescue said, “get a move on.”
“Said we don’t deserve it,” Stanton said impatiently.
“Everybody together for the fireworks and singing,” Fortescue called. “Charles,” he shouted past Quinn, “Reveille!” Charles Murray materialized looking a little worn but well preserved. He put the bugle to his mouth and took it down again.
“This won’t be terribly good,” he said.
“Blow,” said Fortescue, and Murray raised the bugle to his smiling lips. What came out was nothing like Reveille at all. It was a forlorn sound and reminded Quinn of the noise that must have been made by those animals that were the transitional phase between birds and reptiles. But everyone gathered around and sat crosslegged in front of the platform, behind which Murray now knelt on one knee striking matches. Soon a little string of sparks hung in the air before him and he whirled, ran, then bit the dust as the first rocket, then the second and third shot aloft and burst flowers of color on the sky. Murray sang:
“O-oh, say can you see,
By the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail,” etc.
People took the song up, standing at attention under trees, canvas and the influence of intoxicants. Children cease
d their industrious grubbing to salute our flag. When the singing stopped, more rockets went aloft. One fell over as it was lit and hit Mrs. Scott in the belly without damage. The projectile was covered with a blanket before it went off and when it did, it did so with a cough and writhed like an animal underneath, finally burning its way through in a thousand places. Mrs. Scott, meanwhile, ran through the camp howling. Quinn remarked the quality of her voice which was like the singing tops of his youth: a fluty, metallic sound, cyclical and, for a human voice, quite unacceptable. Stanton cried, “Shut the twat up before she wrecks the party!” This swung unfriendly attention upon himself that was only dissipated by the spectacle of a fiery wheel racing on a guy wire, back and forth between two trees. Then Quinn watched Scott confront Stanton and tell him he didn’t have to put up with this kind of behavior. “Do you realize what could have happened to her?” exclaimed the irate academician. “That could have blown her insides out!”
“No harm there.”
“What—?”
Stanton walked away. The attention of the crowd now flickered between him and the fireworks and their eyes seethed like frogs’ eggs about to hatch. Stanton prowled. When there was a pause in the fireworks, he cried, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” Stars and stripes appeared, pinwheels and carnations popped on the sky like drops of paint on glass. One rocket went up and exploded with a terrific crack, and since there was no visible display the darkness seemed a picture. Murray ran around with a lighted punk setting things off, rockets that shot from troughs or off sticks, some that whistled and screamed like V-2s and buzz bombs. What was needed was the sound of hordes, real Dino di Laurentiis hordes, Kirk Douglas directing Vandals, Saxons, Celts, Wogs, their women in tailored skins showing a bit of tit. Murray did his best. He raced around setting fire, but it was so incomplete without the sound of hordes, though the steady upward stream of fiery trails, the streaking back and forth of the burning wheel, the whistles, explosions and chemical colors aloft were enough. “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” At the far end of the tent, the children were lofting firecrackers into the group, and when they’d blow and the bits of fiery cardboard flew around, the women screamed and struck at their clothes as though there were spiders on them.
“How about lending a hand for a change,” Fortescue said to Quinn, indicating the antic Murray.
“Right you are,” Quinn said, not moving but winking most agreeably. Quinn went into the tent to get away from the fun. The first thing he noticed were the shapes that the lights threw on the tent from outside, distorted human shapes that moved at unnatural speed, appeared as recognizable silhouettes, then burst out of their forms to blacken the whole end of the improvised tent. Under the canvas ledge, reading a magazine, was the handsome little mother who had caused Quinn to fall down so foolishly at the beach. He wandered toward her as though on a retracting tether, as though he needn’t even move his feet. She put the magazine down and smiled first on one side and then on the other. When he spoke, his voice came from the past. “Nice to see you,” he said, after Scott. She wouldn’t pretend to speak. She smiled now and then arbitrarily and had very white teeth, very white. “I’ve been thinking about you ever since,” Quinn said. He sat down and began to poke and fuss around experimentally. Half an hour later, giddy with foreplay, he thinks, Oh, my god, my god, oh, my god. Can they see me? Quinn looked around to the entire open front of the tent. Oh, my god, I know they could if they wanted to and I don’t care I’m going at it anyway and isn’t she nice. He could see the line of the bathing suit that had confined his view at the beach while her child beat the sand with its little shovel. My god, I am going to score right out of the blue, I am I tell you. Spengler, someone, keep them distracted, tell them this proves it, the West is not declining, or does this prove it is; but give them absolutely any theory that will distract them and I will score if you do; keep them mindful of our country’s origins. The rockets’ red glare. Let them have it. Quinn worked toward the last buttons one-handed; the other did its rooting with an especially scurvy lewdness; she rested on her elbows and the breasts slipped to the sides, then she let down on her back. In a minute I’ll be at it like some hyperthyroid mongoose. She hooked a forefinger in the corner of her pretty mouth, her face rosy with the strange light, the monster show still sweeping over the canvas from outside. Isn’t she lovely. Like some precocious baby, my valentine goo goo. He began to thrash and struggle violently with his own clothes like a pickerel in a bucket. Get these god damned duds off without losing the old momentum. Keep it up someone out there but I don’t care if you don’t. Nothing is to come between me and my febrile plans. Now shall I introduce myself? She doesn’t smell as bad as some of these birds. The bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. There: look at me, naked and glorious, God is a good god in his fashion. That’s it, take the little devil, he’s yours. The forefinger still in the mouth. Then she puts the thumb in the other corner and neatly collapses her face by removing a surprising set of dentures. Ohmygod! Her chin is under that nose. That face is trying to smile. That face thinks this is funny. I don’t care I don’t care. Put a bag and remember the flesh of this flesh. Presently she accommodates him, as a wild Cucaracha howls outside on the loudspeaker. She stares listlessly at a small spot on the canvas. Quinn lost no time. As he did so, he heard a cry, “ON WITH THE GIZMOS!” then perceived waggish Stanton, winking, taking a chorus of La Cucaracha and doing an expert Samba in the entranceway. Quinn, expended, could hardly go on. He was now irritable and—he faced up to it—doing little more than lurching. “Keep it upp,” she gummed impassively. Quinn knew that people had been watching by now and he was upset. “They’ve seen my ass!” he whispered harshly.
“I don’t care I don’t care. Keep it upp.”
“But I can’t get going!” He was now outright cranky. She looked at him. Her eye, grave and considerable in its fixity, caught his: venom. She got up and tipped him over.
“Some gwatitude!”
She began to dress, Quinn too. Outside Stanton had begun haranguing informally. Quinn went to the entrance, then turned back. “Why did you let me walk in like that and…” Her jaw worked as she sorted out her clothes. She didn’t bother to look up at his struggle for words. The teeth beside her seemed to have a bleak life of their own and rested on the ground in mechanical hilarity.
“What’th the diff, anyway?”
“A big difference to me!”
“Aw, poopoo, you want to be loffed. Ith that it?”
“Yes!” he said indignantly. When she didn’t actually have her chin pressed under her nose, she managed to retain a woebegone beauty, as if an aging of her former, toothed self. “I want just that.” Quinn got up without a word and went outside. Something was delaying Stanton. Quinn could see Janey nearby, aloof, and hauntingly disconnected from the heated talk around her. Stanton was disagreeing about something and as Quinn wandered toward him, he saw the young woman he had just left talking gaily with a companion and pointing at him. The extinction of decency. She hadn’t troubled to replace her teeth. Even from here Quinn noted the way her slack lips tugged around her mobile tongue when she talked. Stanton was now quarreling behind him and he wanted to avoid it. In the good warm night the sounds of other fireworks from afar were like war: towns going under, divisions, heavy stuff being moved. Before him the tent heaped up white in the light like meringue. Was this really so bad? He felt very even right now and did not believe in decline. He attributed the feeling to having been able to take his pleasure like an animal. That face he didn’t want to see gazing at a spot upon the canvas, the dewy, girlish flesh presented as foursquare as a billboard: just fine, just what was required to keep the spirit intact.
Janet Fortescue walked past, giving him a little wave. She was too heavy in the leg, almost grossly so, and sought to counter it by affecting a startling lightness of head and torso, delicate, floating gestures, gay tossings of the head. It was a little like movies of man’s first hapless attempts at flight when
the sodden earth and its gravity were shown to dominate the frailest constructs of wood and lacquered cloth. Her hands fluttered an abandoned greeting to Murray as he labored over a rocket trough; she ran past him like a rhino. He took off after her on wild flapping feet.
“Come on,” Fortescue said, “you’ve got to be good for something. Talk Stanton into letting us dig up the time capsule before he makes his speech.” Quinn marveled at the power and leverage Stanton had acquired.
“I can’t talk him into anything.”
“What can you do? What can you do?”
“Beastly little. My proudest accomplishment is of being no use to you.” Fortescue ambled away, organizing, saying, “The dead weight I have known!”
Dilemmas: Quinn was bored with marshaling and being marshaled; it was how he made his living. For the time being, he preferred, as a spectator, fixed ideas and compulsion: they were picturesque. Stanton’s playing every man for a fool was, right now, fine with Quinn. And this was just the situation for him to perform freely in. The usual rules seemed to have expired. Except for a few holdouts, mostly the kind of men who get more and more dolled up the more uncivilized things become and who now stood around the fire sipping from Martini glasses in spurious gentility, except for these, it could have been the Bronze Age.
On the other hand, maybe it would be exactly this that would constrain Stanton. Heretofore he had relied heavily on the expectations of others for his effects. And when he didn’t find them, he could become dangerously ill-humored. Quitting the only job he had ever had, for example, he had relieved himself in a potted plant in the crowded executives’ lounge. To his great amusement and gratification, many looked with horror at him over their coffee cups. Then his boss, in destructive civility, called from his own crowded table, “Mine’s bigger than yours, Vernor!” And Stanton went unexpectedly surly and had to be turned out by the police. Since he owned the company, no charges were pressed. Was something of this obtaining now? The closer the club moved toward a state of which he would have been expected to approve, the more humorless he became in his stunts. But, from what Janey had to say, the process had begun much earlier.
The Sporting Club Page 15